Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, California

A rambling complex in the hills behind the campus, Lawrence Berkeley Lab is a historic physics research facility adjacent to the University of California, Berkeley, which operates the lab for the Department of Energy. Several unique facilities have been built at Lawrence Berkeley over the years, since it was originally created in the 1930's for the development of the cyclotron, the first particle accelerator, for which laboratory founder Ernest Orlando Lawrence was awarded the 1939 Nobel Prize in physics. In 1993, Lawrence's original cyclotron was replaced with a third-generation synchrotron known as the Advanced Light Source. Built at a cost of around $100 million, it can produce beams of both x-ray and ultraviolet light several orders of magnitude greater than anything found in nature.